4 Things to Consider When Developing Your Video Marketing Strategy

Screens are everywhere. Most of us wake up to phone screens in the morning, use screens at work, and watch screens for entertainment in the evening. Screens have been advancing into our daily lives and improving year after year. There are evenfoldable screens now!

As screens and internet speeds have improved, video has become a more and more viable form of content.Fifty-five percent of people watch videos online every single day, and Facebook generatesover eight billion video views per day!

On those social media sites,92 percent of mobile video consumers share videos with others. Clearly video content has become the best way to connect with consumers.

For businesses, developing your video marketing strategy is key to getting noticed in our video content world. Many businessesmake mistakes during this development process. If you want to create a winning video marketing strategy, you’ll need to consider these questions.

1. What Are Your Video’s Content and Goals?

Every business’s ultimate goal is to sell more of their product. Unless you’re selling elixirs from the fountain of youth, chances are most people will be off-put by a direct sales pitch.

Creating an effective video for your marketing campaign requires a delicate balance between encouraging the customer to buy your product while not appearing overzealous in your sales pitch. Defining your goals can be the best way to avoid being another spammy advertisement for consumers to ignore.

When it comes to video content, your goal should not be just to sell, but to educate, engage, entertain, and inspire the viewers as well. If you create a video for the sole purpose of selling your product, it comes across as uninspiring and ignores the importance of building trust in a sale. Instead, focus on building a relationship with the consumer.

Customer testimonials, tutorial videos, and demonstration videos are thetop three most effective types of video content. What do these videos have in common?

The key is that there is no hard sales pitch. These types of videos build trust by providing the consumer something of value without them purchasing anything.

Imagine you create an educational video showing several ingenious ways to use your product. The customer receives a fun video that shows how the product exists in the real world and what problems it will solve for them.

Of course, goals like “getting more product page conversions” or “increasing site traffic” are important for your business. But providing value with your videos is an essential component of setting your business apart.

Luxy Hair is a great example of this type of marketing. Luxy Hair creates videos on YouTube that act as comprehensivehairstyling tutorials for any type of hair braid you can imagine. While the videos sometimes feature their products, the goal of the video is not to sell the products. The goal is to provide the consumer value, and that emphasis creates trust in the brand, especiallyamong millennial consumers.

2. Who’s Your Target Audience?

Part of defining your video’s goal includes identifying your target audience. Remember that one time you stayed home sick from work or school and watched The Price is Right? Did you happen to notice a general theme permeating the commercials? Pretty much every commercial is devoted to the older adult demographic because that’s the group that regularly watches the show.

The most effective video marketing strategy is being specific and direct with your message. General platitudes about “educating the audience” or “driving sales with viral marketing” are difficult to measure and appeal to just about no one. Instead, spend a little extra time working onthese three things:

Identifying key demographics and income level

Evaluating your target customer’s lifestyle

Creating a specific customer persona

An effective video for a college-educated, middle-aged mother of three is wildly different than one for a 20-year-old man who snowboards. If you are selling snowboards, you probably aren’t going to be including Pinterest-style creative videos in your video marketing strategy.

3. What Are Your Metrics?

Tracking your video results may not be sexy, but it is vital to developing a successful video marketing strategy.

The beauty of video content is that it’s infinitely easier to measure the parts of the video people find interesting. If you create a blog post or social media post, it can be difficult to know when the viewer stopped reading or if they read it at all. With video, you can see clearly whether the viewer watched the whole video or when they stopped watching.

Companies likeVidyard andWebpageFX provide a plethora of video marketing analytics resources for your videos. Only35 percent of companies utilize video analytics, which means 65 percent of businesses have no idea why their videos are working in the first place!

“Views” metrics can tell you whether the videos you poured your heart and soul into are being watched. More advanced metrics such as “drop-off rates” and “interaction” can show you how your target audience is engaging your video content.

Say you make a seven-minute snowboarding video about your new snow gear but find that almost all your customers stop watching after four minutes, and all of your in-video product links happen after the six-minute mark. With this information, you now know to change the length of your videos to suit the consumer’s viewing habits. Don’t be afraid to change your videos after they’ve been published.

4. Who Is Developing Your Content?

If you want continuous content production, you’ll likely need smaller budgets per video. Developing videos on your own, say with a smartphone or laptop, is a great way to produce quick and easy content. Many YouTube and Instagram personalities utilize this method to produce their content, but even theyuse equipment of higher quality than most home video production.

If you have a larger budget and wish to produce something of higher quality, then seeking out an agency is your best bet. The benefit of hiring an agency is that you get professional content tailored exactly to your target audience. Often, an agency will also go beyond one-time strategy development and help you adapt to changes and trends over time.

Just remember: When choosing one of these options, you get what you pay for!

Developing Your Effective Video Marketing Strategy

Before you get started on your video marketing strategy, remember one simple rule: Keep it simple. It’s easy to conflate complexity with success in video marketing. You don’t need huge productions posted across every social media site under the sun.

A great video marketing strategy is built upon “design thinking,” which involves asking yourself these three simple questions:

What’s it for? – Define the purpose and your video’s goals.

Who’s it for? – Define your target audience and get specific.

How will you know if it’s worked? – Define what kind of attitude or behavior change you want to inspire.

Once you answer these questions, most of your plan will fall in place. When you’re ready to promote, there arearticles uponarticles on what strategies you can use to market your video content. The best advice, however, is not to overthink the process—just get out there and do!